The cost of one member

We had a bit of a crisis of conscious recently. The club has worked hard to distance itself from old associations. We didn't tell  about the new group who we saw as papercut toxic. The kinds who use gay or girl as insults. The people that define microagressions.

We're now big enough to need formal rules and procedures.  It's not enough to rely on the goodwill of members and gentlemanly behaviour. And yes, I don't like virtue signaling. You come into my space- you treat everyone in the room as if they could, regretfully, kill you.

Not going to lie. I balked at a formal code of conduct, I have to be actively promoting it. I looked at the code with apprehension, assuming that nobody would willingly break it. Worrying about if I did.

I didn't think that people would object to the rules. Let alone people we trusted. We're a club of 60+ active members, we can take walk ins, we can be idiots sometimes, but we have a principle of diversity.

So we have someone who refused to obey a code that expected people to recognise pronouns- 3 years of goodwill, equipment loans and valuable contribution lost because he couldn't learn a name or respect personhood.

I am angry it came to this. But proud that this was the decision.